"…if you're in a public-facing room of the house, then who owns the stuff in that room? (A lot of Gone Home pivots on this question, of who owns which spaces?) To help you figure that out, objects frequently overlap each other: something that belongs to one character might sit on top of a leaflet they picked up, which sits on top of a letter they received. It uses these spatial connections to emphasize the narrative connections between things and what they symbolize." Robert Yang, as expected, is shrewd and fascinating in his take on Gone Home. But I really liked this point: in many ways, it's a really interesting game to view from a material culture perspective – the way spaces are used, and personalised, and (in a home people have just moved into) what are the _first_ things they have unpacked? And so forth. It's a good game about actual, honest, *stuff*, and the way it represents us.

"Sheetsee.js is a JavaScript library, or box of goodies, if you will, that makes it easy to use a Google Spreadsheet as the database feeding the tables, charts and maps on a website. Once set up, any changes to the spreadsheet will auto-saved by Google and be live on your site when a visitor refreshes the page." This is good.

"All it takes to get a website going for a repository on GitHub is a branch named gh-pages containing web files. You also don’t need a master branch, you can have a repo with just one branch named gh-pages. Here is what I think is really cool, if you fork a project with just a gh-pages branch, you’re only a commit away from having a live version yourself. If this repo being forked is using sheetsee.js then everyone is a fork, commit and spreadsheet away from having a live website connected to an easy (a familiar spreadsheet UI and no ‘publish’ flow because Google autosaves) to use database that they manage (control permissions, review revision history)." Very smart.

"We need to be armed not only with outrage at the intrusion but with the opinion that every financially motivated imposition is a missed opportunity to enhance the city we live in. Services on our streets are always in change, post boxes and pay phones are becoming antiquated, but there is a real and exciting potential for these spaces to become something else, something human, something exciting and most importantly, something for us." Cracking post from Ben about Renew's bins, some of what we learned in Hello Lamppost, and how people do – and could – engage with the cities they live in.

"As serious intellectuals often do, we spent hours discussing these questions, what data we would want to collect to answer them, and even how we might go about collecting it. It sounded like a fun project, so I wrote a program that takes video captures of our Mario Kart 64 sessions and picks out when each race starts, which character is in each box on the screen, the rank of each player as the race progresses, and finally when the race finishes. Then I built a web client that lets us upload videos, record who played which character in each race, and browse the aggregated stats. The result is called Kartlytics, and now contains videos of over 230 races from over the last year and change." Yes, it's a plug for manta, but it's also a nifty piece of engineering.

"Termshows are purely text based. This makes them ideal for demoing instructions (as the user can copy-paste), making fail-safe "live-coding" sessions (plain text is very scalable), and sharing all your l33t terminal hacks." Really lovely: record terminal activity, upload it to a URL, share it with others, dead simple. And the client playback is all javascript. Lovely.

09 August 2013

I’m working on a hardware project at the moment that’s more complex than a basic microcontroller-build that I could have implemented with an Arduino. So I’ve been using a Raspberry Pi as the centre of the project, and writing my code in the high-level languages I’m most proficient in. (In this case, Ruby).

As the project nears completion, it’s really important that the device doesn’t manifest as a computer in any way: it’s just a physical object. To that end, I’d like all the software inside the miniature computer to run at startup without any manual intervention.

My Pi is running Raspbian – the Pi-focused version of Debian – so, fortunately, there’s a tool easily available to do that for us: upstart.

We’ll write an upstart configuration for our script, which will turn our script into an upstart service, which we can then start at login.

First, let’s install upstart:

sudo apt-get install upstart

This will issue some warnings, because – on my install – it was replacing the traditional init.d setup. Don’t worry; everything will continue to work.

Once you’ve installed upstart, reboot your Pi, either from the command line or with a power-cycle.

Let’s now make an upstart config file. Here’s a very basic one:

Put this code into /etc/init/myscript.conf. You should then be able to run the script by typing sudo start myscript, and kill it with sudo stop myscript. And, of course, you’ll discover it’ll start automatically on startup.

That’s a very simple example, with no dependencies. But that won’t work for the script I’d like to use. In this example, I’m running a Ruby script (using the Pi Piper library) that blinks an LED attached to GPIO Pin 17. That script needs to be run as root to get access to the GPIO pins, and it needs to reference the directory’s Gemfile. Upstart scripts are run as root, so that’s not an issue – but we need to set up the environment correctly. That’s not so hard:

As you can see, we just have to export the BUNDLE_GEMFILE variable so that Bundler will know where the Gemfile is located.

Also, you’re going to have to make sure that all references to files in your code are done with absolute paths. That wasn’t a problem with the simple shell script example, but becomes an issue with more real-world type code – especially the program I’m ultimately running, which has various includes, dependencies, and data files to load. An obvious place you’ll run into this with Ruby is when setting up the $LOAD_PATH.

Rather than starting my Ruby script

$LOAD_PATH << 'lib'

I had to do this:

$LOAD_PATH << File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__)) + '/lib'

And similarly, any other references to file loading will need to be absolute – and, ideally, derived using tricks like File.dirname(__FILE__) rather than through hardcoded paths.

Anyhow: it took me a while to piece together, but now that I have, it felt worth writing down – because I’ve now got reasonable complex computation-backed hardware working in an entirely headless enclosure – and one that’s resilient to power-cycling.

"East London Kinetics manipulate digital and physical materials to create richly interactive experiences. We use technology to invite excitement, drama and spectacle into the world. We are designers, technologists and storytellers. We encourage your escapism." Good name, good logo, good people.

"The notion that an artist’s life project, his crowning glory, should have been a sort of side project, something done in the margins, as it were, while he was busy getting on with the real thing (whatever that was) is to be savored. It expresses an almost universal truth, and says everything about Phillips’s infatuation with whim, chance, and the vicissitudes of choice." Lovely review. Also, gosh, the second edition looks exciting.

"Work energises work, and I have set about filling some of those remaining frames for Version II which, in anticipation, hold blank grey sheets. Half a dozen have already appeared with more to follow as the exhibition heads to its closing in January 2014. One such revised page features Peckham mud combined with that gathered from a nearby river in Massachusetts." What a wonderful way to hang it.